How to use redirection in C for file input

Question

I need to get the file from the terminal, I know the command will look like:

./a.out < fileName.txt

I'm not sure how to use fgets() in my program to use the file requested from the terminal.

Answer 1

Using redirection sends the contents of the input file to stdin, so you need to read from stdin inside your code, so something like (error checking omitted for clarity)

#include <stdio.h>

#define BUFFERSIZE 100

int main (int argc, char *argv[])
{
    char buffer[BUFFERSIZE];
    fgets(buffer, BUFFERSIZE , stdin);
    printf("Read: %s", buffer);
    return 0;
}

Answer 2

1.) you close stdin then assign a different file handler to it 2.) replace stdin with any other file handler using dup2 function you can achieve it